How to Write a Computer Essay

In general, the idea is to use the Chatroom to help you work out your solutions. Don't worry about making mistakes; the important thing is to share ideas. Sometimes, especially for the unintuitive problems, the mistakes can be very illuminating and can help you learn.

Essay Instructions

You are responsible for writing solutions to two of the computer essay problems. These solutions are to be submitted on paper (not over the computer) at the end of the quarter.

The first rule: Be Creative. You do not have to limit yourself to writing a description, and in fact, you SHOULD NOT limit yourself to this. Instead, you should also write about the problem. What's the history of the problem? Why is it interesting? Is it difficult? Why? Maybe you can use the comments posted to the Chatroom to point out common errors made while solving this problem. Or other people's solutions that you thought were helpful or clever. You can use the Search tools to find out other things about the problem, if you wish.

A one-page essay (you can go longer, but no longer than two pages) has approximately five paragraphs. The first should introduce the problem. The second might want to give some background or explain assumptions made. The third and fourth paragraphs (roughly speaking) should explain your solution. The final paragraph might point out difficulties with the problem, or other versions of the problem, or what happens if you change the assumptions. Or it should just be a summary of the points you made previously.

The papers will be graded primarily on how well you present your argument. Mostly we will look for a well organized, clearly reasoned argument.

If you are worried about writing a good essay, use your classmates. Soon we'll be telling you how you can post your essays on the Net so that your classmates can review the papers for you. You can also show them to friends to get some feedback and get errors corrected.

Why are we doing this? This is not a writing class, so you shouldn't spend lots of time worrying about these essays. On the other hand, no matter how good a problem solver you are, if you can't explain your solutions, you will have limited success. And the better you can explain yourself, the further you can advance in your chosen career. I think you'll find that being forced to organize your thoughts for a written presentation helps clarify your thinking and may actually help you understand material you didn't understand before.

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